She should not have needed to build a case at ten years old while the grown ups around her argued about paperwork. The fact that she did, and that it worked, does not make it right. It makes it necessary. And the distance between right and necessary is the space where most of the real grief in this story lives.
But she is okay. That is the sentence I come back to. She is okay. She sleeps through the night.
She laughs at the dinner table. She does her homework and argues about bedtime and leaves her shoes in the hallway where I trip over them, and each time I trip I feel something that is not annoyance but its opposite, the small, daily evidence that a child is living in this house without vigilance, without the need to watch and record and prepare, without the weight of a secret she was never supposed to carry.
